|
Quote from Zain Upton's post:
Hello SETI Community,
Let me clear up a few things here.
"There are many ways to skin a cat" - anon.
Most of the poignant points have been brought up here already. I am getting about 10 emails a day now saing "Your stats are BUGGY". I am sure Willy, Neil, Toby and a few others are as well *smile*.
MOST (and its not ALL) of the stats sites rely on the BOINC Project XML that is created. SETI creates a series of XMLs and stores them in the /stats/ directory. Most of the external stats sites check to see if these files are new (checking hourly) and when they ARE new downloads them and then processes them.
Note:
* SETI currently only updates THEIR XML once a day (some other projects do it more frequently)
* YOUR stats (by clicking in Your account or your name link) are REALTIME... so there may be a delay factor until your current to the minute totals appear in the XML files (and hence in the statistics on external sites)
* Stats on external sites REALY on the XML files and are HENCE NOTE REAL TIME.
That said, there does seem to have been an issue with the XML udpating properly the last few days. I know the developers have been working on a new version of the client side servers, so MAYBE something has changed!
What everyone is noticing is their numbers just arent adding up.
Now why are SOME sites still working?
Well thats easy too. Some sites STILL download the HTML pages (like this page) and suck the information out of those to fill their databases! Its a horribly inefficient way of doing it... and one the BOINC developers discourage. There is only one advantage of this... you can get REAL TIME stats. Big disadvantages though including down ALL web pages for everyone else (and big bandwidth issues).
Take Digger for example (since he posted recently)
His profiles says the following (REAL TIME STATS)
http://setiweb.ssl.berkeley.edu/show_user.php?userid=8080336
SETI@home member since 23 Mar 2005
Total credit 2,057.00
The current XML says this (THE OFFICIAL XML DUMP in /stats/)
8080336
Digger
United States
1111537689
1711.840977
...
And my stats pages say this (note the LAST XML update time is 16 hrs ago!)
http://www.boincsynergy.com/stats/boinc-stats.php?id=8080336&project=sah
BOINC XML Data last updated: Tue 12 Apr 19:11:19 2005 GMT (16.80 hours ago.)
Total credit: 1,711.84 results
So you can see... many things are contributing here... BUT the XML stats do match the stats on my external page (and if you check also on www.boincstats.com etc)
I hope this clears up a few things... and am more than happy to answer anyones questions regarding these matters.
Might I just add as a final note... EVERYONE here is in BOINC for the long term. If some stats are out for a few hours its not THAT big a deal. Once daily updates of the XML is a valid thing considering how CPU intensive it is for SETI (thats SETI servers, not my servers). Its not THAT crucial to get up to the minute stats when your crunching for years!
Cheers from Sunny Albury NSW Australia,
Zain Upton
End quote | 
